Sunday, December 6, 2015

Dynamics AX Load Balancing tips

Working with Single AOS environment and Load balanced environment is very different. Specially, when it comes to releasing code in production environment or making changes in AIF service data policies. Following are few things which I learnt in my recent project:

If running multiple AOSs for load balancing and you need to make data policy changes (i-e need to enable or disable fields in a web service), you must bring all AOSs down and restart the service when change is made and CIL is performed.

If running multiple AOSs and made some code change that needs CIL change. Again, must bring all AOSs down and restart them when change is made to make the change effective in all environments (servers)

If running multiple AOSs and modified workflow (i-e a new workflow version is added), Must refresh cache in all other environments. You don't need to bring production environment down for that purpose and just login to all servers and refresh the cache (Tools > Cache > Refresh AOD, data, dictionary)

If you are using load balancing and you have written custom .net API which calls AIF services. The custom .Net API MUST be deployed on physical cluster and not the load balanced one. Otherwise, it won't be able to authenticate and you will get NTLM authentication error.